Ensuring At-Risk Children are Ready for School
It is difficult to start writing about anything else with the backdrop of last week’s horrific devastation in Haiti. While our life goes on and our work continues, it is sobering to realize that not that far away, a country and a people struggle to regain even the most basic necessities while facing the overwhelming loss of everything they once knew.
This human tragedy does not diminish the challenges we face here in the United States. But it does provide a sobering reminder of how fortunate many of us are and the role we can play in helping others, whether in Haiti or here at home, who lack access to the privileges that we can easily take for granted.
So, with that in mind, I wanted to recognize one Oregon organization that our company, Knowledge Learning Corporation, has supported for several years. The Children’s Institute is dedicated to improving the lives of Oregon’s at-risk children by ensuring that they enter school ready to learn.
One of the initiatives they support is called Ready for School. This initiative, led by business and community leaders, encourages investments in early childhood education, recognizing its beneficial impact not just for the individual child and family, but for society as a whole. The benefits include reduced crime and school drop-out rates, reduced need for adult social services and, ultimately, an enhanced economic competitiveness.
While you have heard this information before, Ready for School has added a very engaging feature to their website–weekly, two- minute videos from Professor James Heckman, the Nobel prize winning economist whose research is widely cited in making the case for investing in high quality early childhood education programs. In these videos, Professor Heckman covers a range of topics from early health care to crime to the role of the family.
As an acclaimed economist, Professor Heckman transformed the debate about investing in early childhood education from primarily a moral imperative to one that also recognized the broad reaching economic benefits of doing what is right. I thought you might enjoy hearing and seeing him for yourself.
Tags: James Heckman, ready for school, the children's institute
Uncategorized | Elanna | 
January 18, 2010 4:56 pm
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